Red Light at Dawn

On one of the most remarkable dawns I can remember

In 2007 I drove up to Torridon for my first Advanced Large Format (ALF) Workshop. We were in the process of selling our house down south and had moved into temporary accommodation near the York racecourse on Tadcaster Road. As a result the drive was significantly less onerous than the Scotland drives I had been used to.

On the first morning we headed out to the only well-known dawn location in the area, Loch Clair. It was my first introduction to the area and although I made a couple of images, I used it more as a scouting session. At the end of the session I found a composition I liked and reviewed it on my Nikon Coolpix over breakfast. Key was the relationship between the right-hand-most tree and the mountain. In the scouting image it was crossing - I needed to keep the separation and built the image around that key point. I resolved to shoot it the following morning.

So at early o’clock we headed out again. It looked promising with good gaps in the cloud and a slight red glow to the sky. The red kept on developing. By the time I was set up it was downright eerie. Eventually I looked behind me and gasped. I had been so absorbed in trying to set up and focus the TK in the dark (you try it!) that I had been oblivious to the lenticular cloud behind us lighting up bright red. I pulled out my Coolpix and snapped the alternative image. And then returned to my main composition. I waited for the mountain at the back, Liathach, to light and made the main image. Nothing short of an astonishing dawn.